Eagle Field Runway Drags: Your Nitro-Fueled Window to the Past

We’re talking about the Eagle Field Runway Drags organized by Rocky Phillips and held twice a year on an old WWII airfield, Eagle Field, 200 something miles north of Los Angeles just off the Interstate 5 in, well, a field. We way-backed to their May 2016 time warp of nitro, speed, and crazy fun.

Fifteen bucks to get in and you’ve time traveled to the way drag races were back in the 1950s and 1960s when there was little corporate control, minimal sponsorship, tons of creativity, and much fun.

Hanging with Rich Guasco’s Pure Hell AA/Fuel Altered team, we didn’t realize the fuel pits would be full of old friends such as Sonny Messner with Don Garlits’ Swamp Rat III; Bobby Hansen and Andi Humenik with a couple of fuel dragsters (Bobby’s old, Andi’s new); Aaron Von Minden with an early 1960s digger complete with weed spreaders; “Too Tall” Pat Ganahl, the former HOT ROD editor with his Ike Iacono Jimmy-6 dragster; and Stormy Byrd with the Revelation AA/FD, who was match racing Brian Hope in Pure Hell.

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The vast majority of the field, which is actually a dirt lot or a lot of dirt sprayed with some chemical to keep the dust down, comprises a couple hundred door cars of every make and model from funky VWs to wheelstanding Gassers. The prize of the day, though, was hanging with Ed “Isky” Iskenderian, who at 95 years old, could operate two iPhones at once. Truly the iconic iPhather.